It’s 10pm and Elham, a 45-year-old mother of two, is driving her car looking for passengers. She was recently laid off from her full-time job and now has to work as an unofficial taxi driver.

“They fooled us all for two years, saying the [nuclear] deal is imminent,” she mumbled while driving. “For two years they told us to be patient, saying after the deal Iran will turn into heaven, sanctions will be lifted. What happened to all those promises?”

More than two years into the administration of President Hassan Rouhani and three months into the nuclear deal with six world powers, many in the middle class in Iran feel the government - which has called itself the government of prudence and hope - has not delivered on its promise of economic improvement.

According to the government’s statistics centre, only 23 million out of 64 million Iranians of working age have jobs. In March, the minister of labour, Ali Rabiei, said that out of these 23 million, seven million have “unofficial or pseudo jobs”. And according to the World Bank, Iran in 2014 had the world’s highest inflation rate after Venezuela, Sudan, Argentina, Malawi and Belarus.

“With prudence and hope… all the problems will be solved,” Rouhani said in a television election debate in May 2013. “The nuclear issue and sanctions will be solved and we will have a booming economy.”

In June 2013, later in the election campaign, Rouhani said: “In the first two months of the prudence and hope government people will feel the positive effects of our efforts. I have one-month, three-month, one-year and four-year plans to eliminate economic problems.” And among his promises, Rouhani promised to decrease unemployment “dramatically”, vowing his government would bring it down to “normal global rates”.

With all these promises, Elham and some other Iranians were expecting that soon after the nuclear deal, they could feel positive effects on the economy and consequently on their personal lives. But positive change has not occurred.

For nearly ten years Elham, who holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting, used to work full-time in a small private food distribution company, while also holding a part-time position in an insurance company.

But a few months ago, she was laid off from her full-time job. “Two or three weeks after the nuclear deal my boss told me that they didn’t have enough budget and had to let me go,” she said. “So I had to concentrate on my part-time job, but that’s not enough. I have also applied for so many jobs and haven’t heard back.”

According to the official Statistical Centre of Iran the unemployment rate was 10.4% in 2013 and 10.6% in 2014. In March 2015 Iranian economic analyst Majid Salimi Boroujeni estimated that in 2015 the unemployment rate would be “10 to 12%”. On 25 October, ISNA news agency reported that in the last Iranian month (ending 22 October) the month-on-month inflation rate had decreased by 0.3% to 13.3%, and the year-on-year rate had decreased by 0.7% to 10.9%.

The economic situation has alarmed officials. On 3 October, four ministers - industry, economy, welfare and defence – made public a letter to Rouhani about an economic downturn they said “could turn into a crisis”. The letter added that although the nuclear deal had led to “plenty of” economic benefits, it had also “created some ambiguities in the market” that needed “to be quickly addressed”.

Rouhani thinks otherwise, and has insisted there is no downturn. On 10 October, a week after his four ministers made their letter public, he said “the situation is such that we might once again fall into a downturn. We need to be alert and try hard.”

But Elham agrees with four ministers that the country is already experiencing a downturn: “This nuclear agreement had no positive effect on our lives. Our pockets are empty. Prices have not gone down but up. All people are postponing purchases, waiting for the situation to stabilise, therefore all the markets - car, real estate, stock - are on hold. We are already in a crisis. I haven’t seen my kids since 6am when I left home, and I have to drive around until 10pm.”

“I don’t want to say Rouhani has fooled us, but honestly over the past two years, nothing has changed,” said an owner of a small bakery in Tehran. “Since the nuclear deal my customers have shrank and as a result my income has dropped.”

But he is hopeful. “I think that once our frozen assets are released and injected into the market, the situation will improve. Now foreign countries are also investing in Iran and in a year our market will flourish.”

In late September Bloomberg quoted Iranian central bank vice governor for foreign exchange affairs, Gholamali Kamyab, that Iran expects about $29bn of its more than $100bn frozen funds to be unfrozen and repatriated to the central bank by January 2016.

Being stuck in an economic blockade for few years, Iran needs time to get back on its feet. But Mohsen Renani, an economist at Isfahan University, recently told Etemad newspaper there would be no economic improvement in the near future, given the Iranian economy has structural problems.

“We had some immediate [economic] problems that were caused by the sanctions - now we are getting rid of them,” he said. “But we also have some deep and chronic structural problems [in our economy] that can lead us into another crisis. In fact, the government can’t deal with this crisis on its own… If we want to pass this crisis, the whole political system needs to get engaged.”

Here’s what one of the journalists at the business newspaper Donya-e-Eqtesad, who favours a liberalised economy, has to say about public expectations of economic improvement: “Iran is like a thirsty person struck by drought who now thinks that he has reached a spring. He wants to quench his thirst. You can’t ask him to stay thirsty for another year. Not that he can’t. If there is no other choice than waiting, he will, by he won’t be happy with it.

“Over the past four years, people had endured a lot of hardship. Mentally, they are ready to collapse - giving them an overview of the future and telling them things will get better won’t make them content. However, they have no other choice but to accept reality.”

The Tehran Bureau is an independent media organisation, hosted by the Guardian. Contact us @tehranbureau